Introduction
There are many companies that their operations, and most of their profit, are based on the Internet. Some of those Internet companies earn most of their money by advertising products and other companies. Examples of such Internet companies are Facebook and Google. Users have the power to destroy any Internet company they want. Most probably you can not do such thing alone but a large group or movement like Anonymous might can. This article is written because I found it interesting and I don’t support any actions that will intentionally harm a company. I will describe two methods that can hurt advertisers and ad-serving companies and websites, if done massively, advertisement blocking and intentional advertisement clicking.
Block Advertisement
One of the most annoying thing I see on almost every website is the advertisement. There is in various forms, there are ads as flash videos, there are ads as moving pictures (gif images), there are ads as still images and there are ads as text. In some websites you can see all the forms of advertisement all over the website. They don’t leave a corner to be blank, they are putting ads everywhere, even in the middle of their website. It is just annoying. The most annoying form by far is advertisement in freaking pop-ups. If you are frustrated from all that advertising all over the Internet you can block it. If your web browser is Firefox or Chrome then you can block most of the ads by installing an add-on called AdBlock Plus. You can install it in just a minute and surf the Internet in a less annoying way. You can control anything, you can disable it in a website or you can block ads manually if the add-on don’t. If you don’t see ads you will not click on them and none will profit from you.
Click on every advertisement you see
There is a plethora of companies serving ads and most of them, if not all of them, have algorithms to prevent false clicks to protect advertisers. If a single user (IP) clicks repeatedly on someone’s ads it will be blocked by the system. If a specific website generates false clicks to a company, that website will be blocked from that company. Image now “everyone” clicking all the ads he sees (even more than once) on every website he visits. Not everyone will ever do that, but if a large group of people do, most of the websites will be blocked and as a result the whole system of serving ads will fail. If the system fails, the companies that serve ads on a Pay Per Click policy will die. After that, advertisers will no longer trust Internet to promote their products and a chain reaction will start that will affect all forms of advertisement and not just PPC. No advertisers means no profit to Internet companies.
Conclusion
You have every right to block the annoying ads, you can’t do it on TV but you can on your browser. I am using AdBlock Plus for years and the Internet is much cleaner in my browser (Firefox) since then. Most of the people don’t know that they can do that, now you know and you have a choice. Internet users have the power to build or destroy Internet empires. Even though nothing described here is illegal, everything is depending on your intentions. Ad blocking needs more users to affect Internet advertisement but intentional ad clicking can affect Internet advertisement faster and with fewer people. If you found that as interesting as I did then I have succeeded on passing you the people have the power way of thinking.